Friday, May 29, 2009

I've made the observation on multiple occasions that in many ways black men have more in common culturally with conservative white guys than they do with male SWPLs*. The black guys I know mercilessly ridicule virtually everything SWPLs like, and my social circle is hardly unique in this regard.

The GSS provides empirical evidence lending support to that claim. In 2008, the survey aksed respondents to self-describe as religious and spiritual, religious but not spiritual, spiritual but not religious, or neither religious nor spiritual. Being spiritual but not religious is a SWPL staple--it allows for a connection with some higher power without adherence to any of the three major monotheistic faiths (think white liberal Buddhists or Wiccans). The following table shows the ratio of the religious but not spiritual to the spiritual but not religious. Because the question has only been posed once, sample sizes for Hispanics and Asians are too small for use:

Group

Religious:Spiritual

Whites (all)

0.94

White males

0.98

White females

0.91

White conservatives

1.30

White liberals

0.65

Blacks (all)

2.04

Black males

2.27

Black females

1.86

Religiosity is the virile manifestation of supernatural belief. Spirituality is its more effeminate version.

GSS variables used: RELSPRT, SEX, RACECEN1, POLVIEWS

* As the acronym SWPL phonetically rolls off the tongue as "swipul" and others in the Steveosphere have apparently adopted it, I've elected to retire "whiterpeople" as the noun of choice for the people satirized by Christian Lander.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

A couple of months ago, Razib showed the relationship between views on the Bible and on extramarital sexual activity. Predictably, biblical literalism increases the likelihood for condemnation of running around. Even when relationships are expected, it's still interesting to see the degree to which various attributes are related.

The pervasive and determined strategy of radicals across our country is to alter traditional values by relentlessly assailing those expressing biblical positions contrary to proponents of a homosexual lifestyle and unceasingly vilifying advocates for the rights of the unborn. Truth is a casualty. The means are everything, and the goal is destruction of the Christian pillars that have stabilized the country for more than two centuries.

Just how different are the takes on these two 'hot buttons' between the most and least religious? The GSS offers a couple of ways of gauging religiosity--descriptions of the Bible, and the frequency of attendance at a house of worship.

The first table shows the level of support for same-sex marriage (on a scale from -2 to +2, with positive values indicating support and negative values indicating opposition) and the percentage of each group that backs the right of a woman to have an abortion for any reason by biblical description. To ensure contemporary relevance, all responses are from the year 2000 on:

Bible

Gay marriage

Abort any reason

Word of God

(1.02)

20.6%

Inspired Word

(0.17)

41.9%

Book of fables

0.50

68.4%

The subsequent table shows the same by frequency of religious attendance:

Attendance

Gay marriage

Abort any reason

More than weekly

(1.44)

11.2%

Weekly

(0.92)

24.2%

Almost weekly

(0.79)

26.6%

2-3x per month

(0.40)

35.8%

Monthly

(0.21)

38.0%

Several times a year

(0.21)

43.7%

Yearly

(0.02)

50.3%

Less than yearly

0.02

53.4%

Never

0.20

55.8%

Like Razib's presentation, nothing is particularly surprising here, other than perhaps how perfect the trends are. Without exception, as frequency of worship increases, support for same-sex marriage and for abortion decreases.

It is understandable that devout Christians feel support for things like same-sex marriage and abortion are tantamount to assaults on their value systems. Conversely, it's easy to see why progressives see religion as an obstacle to realizing their social objectives, even if they do not necessarily despise religiosity per se.

Wednesday, May 27, 2009

With cap-and-trade in the news, I have a more modest proposal to reduce carbon emissions (or at least suck in government funds by trying to do so) and discourage unnecessary gasoline consumption.

Driving home on the interstate yesterday afternoon, I had to kill the cruise control in the face of an irritating line of red brake lights. It ended up taking me 20 minutes to finally move five miles down the road and past the wreck responsible for the jam. Given the 60 mph or so traffic would otherwise have been moving at, this basically translates into 15 minutes of idling. Contingent on make and model, a rough average of one gallon per hour is burned while idling. Thus the delay cost me a quart of fuel, or about 50 cents at current prices. Crawling along, I estimated six cars per second zipping along the interstate in the other direction.

So if this wreck took an hour for tow and cleanup, it caused around $10,800 ($.50 * 6 cars per second * 3600 seconds in an hour) in gas to go up in smoke, er, C02. Slap that fine on the driver responsible for the wreck in addition to the other citation he has coming for him and hopefully he'll be more careful next time!

Let states keep half of this 'revenue' for their own purposes while remitting the other half of it to the federal government to be squandered on whatever green initiative is in vogue at the time, and we'll have a tax hike I'll gladly support.

Sunday, May 24, 2009

++Addition++At Secular Right, Razib finds that there is a larger gap among younger and older liberals and moderates than among younger and older conservatives on the question of same-sex marriage.

---

Last week in response to a caller who identified herself as a lesbian opposing same-sex marriage, radio host Michael Savage claimed that most homosexuals shared her view. While Savage has celerity of mind, for so heavily emphasizing his scientific credentials, he's often sloppy and imprecise. The assertion in question is an example of as much, although the exchange did pique my curiosity regarding the size of the gay minority opposing same-sex marriage.

In 2008, the GSS explicitly asked about sexual orientation for the first time. Of the 22 homosexuals who were also queried about whether or not they support same-sex marriage, 21 back it while only one expressed opposition. Among the same cohort of heterosexuals (N = 1146), 39.9% support it, 47.0% oppose, and 13.1% are on the fence.

To obtain a larger sample size (N = 85), a question about the gender of sexual partners serves as a proxy. From 2004 to 2008, of those whose partners over the last five years have exclusively been of the same sex, 78.8% support same-sex marriage and 10.6% oppose it, while the remainder fence-sits.

Clearly, the vast majority of homosexuals support same-sex marriage. Reasonable estimates of the percentages of gays opposing it are in the 5%-10% range.

On the topic of same-sex marriage, as of 2008, a full two-thirds (67.8%) of self-identified liberals support it, while 1 in 5 (21.4%) oppose. Among conservatives, the distributions are flipped--17.8% support and 69.4% oppose. Moderates are split, with 40.6% supporting and 44.8% opposing.

In 2006, 57.9% of liberal respondents backed same-sex marriage, compared to the 67.8% who most recently voiced support for it. One in 10 have gone over to the pro-gay marriage side in the last two years. Similar changes are occuring among self-described moderates. In 2006, 34.3% supported same-sex marriage. Now 40.6% do. Meanwhile, conservative opposition grew only marginally, from 67.5% in 2006 to the 69.4% currently opposing it.

Friday, May 22, 2009

A couple of months ago, Stopped Clockwondered if "conservative Democrat" is more-or-less a synonym for politically engaged blacks. Among Democrats, blacks are more likely than other groups to be conservative, although not to the extent that the two phrases can be thought of as being synonymous.

The Pew US Religious Landscape surveysuggests blacks are more likely than other groups to self-describe as conservative while still voting Democratic. The GSS allows racial groups to be looked at directly instead of just by proxy. The following table shows the proportion of a group's members who are politically conservative relative to the percentage who are Republicans. If 9 are conservative and 10 are Republican, it is displayed as 90 (9/10, multiplied by 100 for ease of viewing). The 1.5% of respondents who indicated membership to a third party are excluded, since specifics on which party are not given. To insure contemporary relevance, results are from 2000 to 2008:

Group

Con/Rep

Religious* blacks

405.9

Black women

365.7

All blacks

347.1

Black men

321.3

Educated** blacks

316.9

Irreligious^ blacks

282.9

Uneducated^^ blacks

270.5

Religious Hispanics

218.7

Hispanic women

208.3

All Native Americans

184.0

Educated Hispanics

183.7

Uneducated Hispanics

181.7

All Hispanics

170.6

Native Hawaiians/PI

162.5

Irreligious Hispanics

148.2

Hispanic men

142.1

Asian women

123.5

All Asians

112.8

All Jews

102.6

Asian men

101.7

Uneducated whites

94.2

Religious whites

93.6

White men

88.0

All whites

87.3

White women

86.8

Educated whites

85.3

Irreligious whites

83.7

* Religious = Attending a place of worship at least once a week** Educated = 16+ years of education^ Irreligious = Attending a place of worship once per year at most^^ Uneducated = 12 years of education at most

The percentages serve as a good gauge for social conservatism paired with support for redistributionist policies and special privileges for the disadvantaged--think of the values as anti-libertarian scores.

Face validity is apparent. The value for all blacks from the GSS is virtually identical to the value for those who claimed affiliation to historically black churches in the Pew survey (347.1% and 350.0%, respectively). Men tend to be more libertarian-leaning than women are among non-whites, while among whites there is little gender disparity. Jews and Asians are not only similar in educational and economic attainment, but politically as well.

The racial 'hierarchy' is not surprising. Notice, though, that race trumps education, gender, or religiosity in political orientation and partisan identification. Blacks of all stripes are disproportionately socially conservative Democrats. Whites across the board are more libertarian in their outlook than non-whites are. Hispanics fall in between, along with Native Americans and Pacific Islanders. Asians and Jews are as well, although they are nearer to whites than Hispanics are.

Frequency of attendance at places of worship better predicts conservatism than it does propensity to vote for the GOP.

Interestingly, higher educational attainment is associated with a stronger libertarian bent among whites while the opposite is the case among blacks. Put in another way, blacks with modest levels of education (high school or less) are more conservative than college-educated blacks are. For whites, the opposite is true. (That the value for all blacks and all Hispanics does not sit in between the values for educated and uneducated blacks and Hispanics, respectively, is a result of slightly different respondent pools and also the exclusion of the 13-15 years of education contingents).

Thursday, May 21, 2009

N/A, who runs the blog Race/History/Evolution Notes, pointed me to a couple of handytables from the 2000 Census showing cohabitation and marriage statistics by race and gender. To help clear up misconceptions readers might have (as I did), a couple of tables follow. Following the notes at the end of the post are a set of graphs that make the data easier to digest.

The first table is on married men*. The column furthest to the left groups men by race. Subsequent columns show the race of women that men are married to. The values represent the percentage of men of each race (rows) who are married to women of the corresponding race (columns). Thus 96.25% of married white men have a white wife, 0.18% a black wife, 1.79% a Hispanic wife, etc. Among married black men, 5.55% have a white wife, 90.72% a black wife, 1.77% a Hispanic wife, etc.

RACE

OF

WOMAN

MEN

ARE

MARRIED

TO

MEN

White

Black

Hisp

Asian

Nat Am

HI or PI

Other/2+

White

96.3%

0.2%

1.8%

0.9%

0.3%

0.0%

0.5%

Black

5.5%

90.7%

1.8%

0.7%

0.2%

0.1%

1.0%

Hispanic

13.1%

0.6%

84.7%

0.6%

0.3%

0.1%

0.7%

Asian

6.6%

0.2%

1.3%

90.6%

0.1%

0.1%

1.0%

Nat Am

46.6%

1.3%

3.8%

0.9%

45.1%

0.1%

2.2%

HI or PI

25.4%

0.9%

5.9%

6.7%

0.8%

54.5%

5.8%

Other/2+

35.5%

3.5%

6.1%

5.4%

1.1%

0.4%

47.9%

The next table details the same thing for women. So among married white women, 96.83% have a white husband, 0.49% a black husband, 1.54% a Hispanic husband, etc.

RACE

OF

MAN

WOMEN

ARE

MARRIED

TO

WOMEN

White

Black

Hisp

Asian

Nat Am

HI or PI

Other/2+

White

96.8%

0.5%

1.5%

0.3%

0.3%

0.0%

0.5%

Black

2.2%

96.1%

0.9%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.6%

Hispanic

14.9%

1.3%

82.3%

0.5%

0.2%

0.1%

0.7%

Asian

17.6%

1.3%

1.4%

78.0%

0.1%

0.2%

1.5%

Nat Am

46.6%

2.5%

5.0%

0.4%

43.2%

0.1%

2.2%

HI or PI

26.3%

4.3%

4.8%

4.7%

0.5%

54.7%

4.6%

Other/2+

37.0%

5.9%

5.4%

3.0%

1.0%

0.5%

47.2%

The following two tables show cohabitation patterns by race and are constructed in the same fashion. The first is for men. Among cohabitating white men, 93.17% live with a white woman, 0.63% a black woman, 3.14% a Hispanic woman, etc.

RACE

OF

WOMAN

MEN

ARE

LIVING

WITH

MEN

White

Black

Hisp

Asian

Nat Am

HI or PI

Other/2+

White

93.2%

0.6%

3.1%

1.2%

0.7%

0.1%

1.1%

Black

13.6%

80.3%

3.5%

0.6%

0.4%

0.1%

1.5%

Hispanic

21.2%

1.6%

74.1%

0.9%

0.8%

0.1%

1.4%

Asian

26.5%

1.0%

5.5%

62.9%

0.4%

0.5%

3.2%

Nat Am

42.0%

1.7%

4.8%

0.7%

48.2%

0.1%

2.4%

HI or PI

37.9%

2.5%

9.7%

7.1%

1.5%

33.8%

7.5%

Other/2+

46.7%

6.4%

10.3%

4.2%

1.8%

0.5%

30.1%

The following table shows the same for women. Among cohabitating black women, 3.17% live with a white man, 94.21% a black man, 1.56% a Hispanic man, etc.

RACE

OF

MAN

WOMEN

ARE

LIVING

WITH

WOMEN

White

Black

Hisp

Asian

Nat Am

HI or PI

Other/2+

White

90.5%

3.1%

4.1%

0.5%

0.7%

0.1%

1.1%

Black

3.2%

94.2%

1.6%

0.1%

0.1%

0.0%

0.8%

Hispanic

16.5%

4.2%

76.9%

0.6%

0.4%

0.1%

1.3%

Asian

39.7%

5.0%

5.8%

45.2%

0.4%

0.5%

3.4%

Nat Am

38.8%

5.1%

8.5%

0.5%

44.6%

0.2%

2.3%

HI or PI

32.2%

9.8%

10.2%

5.1%

1.0%

36.1%

5.5%

Other/2+

43.0%

13.7%

10.7%

2.6%

1.6%

0.6%

27.8%

What immediately jumps out at me is how the vast majority of whites live with and marry other whites. In addition to being a consequence of a natural preference of people for others similar to themselves, this is also a result of sheer numbers. Most of a white man's potential partners are white.

While a small fraction of whites live with and marry non-whites, significant numbers of non-whites live with and marry whites. If not for immigration and differing fertility rates, non-whites would eventually be swallowed up by the white majority, which would become slightly less white in the process.

The stereotype of the white guy and his Asian wife or girlfriend holds in comparison to the comparatively unusual Asian guy and white girl, but relative to all white men, it constitutes a tiny fraction of the total. Fewer than 1 in 100 white men are married to an Asian woman. Only 1 in 200 white women are married to black men. Although many white nationalists are understandably concerned about white women partnering up with non-white and specifically black men, fewer than 1 in 30 white women who are living in sin are doing so with a black guy.

Parenthetically, I say understandably because cohabitation is disproportionately a living situation of young adults, so the propensity for white women to live with black men is growing—white women are over six times as likely to live with a black man as they are to be married to him--even though it still represents a small fraction of all partnerships. Similarly, the tendency for white men to partner up with Asian women is increasing, though not nearly as rapidly—cohabitating white men are one-third more likely to be living with an Asian woman than married white men are to be married to one. Consequently, while married white men are more likely to have a non-white wife than married white women are to have a non-white husband, cohabitating white women are more likely to be living with a non-white than cohabitating white men are.

These trends have a more ostensible effect on the non-white half of the partnership. That 1 in 110 married white men have an Asian wife while 1 in 83 cohabitating white men living with a woman share a space with an Asian woman, or even that 1 in 200 married white women have a black husband while 1 in 32 cohabitating white women living with a man have a black partner is not easily detectable by the observer on the street. That fewer than 1 in 5 married Asian women have a white husband while 2 in 5 cohabitating Asian women are living with a white man is noticeable, however, as is the disparity between the 1 in 18 married black men who have a white wife compared to the 1 in 7 cohabitating black men who share a space with a white woman.

For relatively small groups like Asians, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders, staying within one's own racial group** requires more conscientious diligence and generally a lowering of one's standards because of the relative paucity of prospective partners. So going outside of one's own race makes more sense the smaller that race is. This is starkly evident among Native Americans--both men and women are more likely to be married to whites than they are to other Native Americans. Consequently, as the percentage of the population that is white continues to shrink, the rate of interracial pairings involving at least one non-white could conceivably decline in the future, especially among fast-growing Asians and Hispanics.

* Hispanics are of all races. All other groupings are of non-Hispanics only. Non-Hispanics who self-describe as being of "some other race" or "two or more races" are grouped together into a single category for ease of presentation.

The tables only show percentages. It is worth noting that for each cohabitating couple, there are eleven married couples.

** Grouping people from the continent of Asia, which holds more than half of the world's population, together into a single group is obviously not optimal, but it is what's available. In this context, it understates the difficulty people of Asian descent living in the US have in finding an acceptable mate who shares their ancestry. Grouping Hispanics of all races into a single category presents similar problems.

Graphs depicting data from the tables above follow. The race and gender in each graph's title is married to or cohabitating with members of the opposite sex at the rates depicted. Keep in mind that the comparisons are among those of the same sex and gender who are in the same living situation. That is, the first graph shows the percentage of married white women, not of all white women, who are married to men of the various racial groups. The color coding is designed to be intuitive and is as follows: White = whites, Black = blacks, Brown = Hispanics, Yellow = Asians, Red = others (including Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, those who self-identified as belonging to "some other race", and those who are of two or more races).

Friday, May 15, 2009

++Addition++Jason Malloy goes to work in the comments. He rarely writes at GNXP, and has no other regular forum so far as I'm aware, yet everything he contributes in comment threads are worthy of wider attention.

---

In the comments of a recent Inductivist post, in proclaiming the death of the nuclear family (to which Ron counters here), Whiskey writes:

When a man finally gets income and power and status GREATER than his femalepeers, they are not very attractive. By that time their sexual partners can easily number in the fifties (assume 3 in HS, 8 in College hothouse environment, and 4 per year average ages 22-32 which is not unusual for professional white Urban women). The ability of a woman to bond with more than a few sexual partners is questionable at best, fertility is limited in any case, so most men in their thirties pursue young women in their twenties. Of whom there are fewer each generation (birth dearth). This leads to ever declining birth rates as women opt for one kid in their thirties as single mothers (or low income women opt for many in their twenties).

Overexaggeration of this sort is thick in the Steveosphere. It's difficult not to come away with the impression that females are too often viewed as a mysterious foreign species, presumed to be giving it up to every well-dressed guy they giggle at and playfully hit on the arm.

That's not the case. Women have a natural inclination to engage potential mates, even when they are not conscientiously thinking about it in this way.

Ostensible flirting is an easy point to arrive at. See a receptionist at your doctor's office searching for something. "What did you lose?" "[Whatever it is]," without looking up. "I just saw you throw a whole stack of stuff away a minute ago. You should keep the stuff you need instead of throwing it away. It'll be easier to find then." She'll scoff or do something similar. "Hey, don't treat me like that. I'm not your boyfriend." You might be ignored from then on, but there's a reasonable chance you now have a conversation going that you can parlay into continuing somewhere else. In a setting where girls are actually fishing for that kind of interaction, it's even easier.

But that's more than a few furlongs away from hitting it. Women play a restrictive role in granting sexual access to men, for obvious evolutionary reasons. You have not scaled the great wall in simply getting face time. The barrier surrounds the inner citadel, not the outskirts of the realm. It is the last thing you'll have to conquer, far more challenging than any of the progressions you'll have made up to that point. The girl's restrictiveness is innate, not easily cast aside in the face of a putatively ever more promiscuous society. We may be inching in the direction Whiskey wishes we'd stear clear of, but we're still leagues away from arriving there.

The GSS allows for approximating the cohort his loose girls are part of. Following is the distribution of sexual partners since 18 for women ages 30-35 (N = 680). Only responses from 2000 to 2008 are included. These women were in their primes during the nineties and the earlier part of this decade:

Partners

0

3.4%

1

23.8%

2

15.8%

3

10.5%

4

6.9%

5

9.5%

6-10

19.6%

11+

10.5%

One in ten have had more than ten partners, an average of one new fling per year. Fewer than 1 in 100 report having at least fifty. Nearly a quarter have stuck with the same man for more than a decade, and more than two-thirds have had five or fewer partners in their entire lives. Some respondents may be underreporting, but the idea that a significant number of women are having sex with a different man every three months is not supportable.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

One of the major themes discussed by Andrew Gelman in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State is how affluence tracks more strongly with the tendency to vote Republican in poorer states than it does in wealthy states. Since blue states are on the whole wealthier than red states are, this translates into a larger income gap between Republicans and Democrats in red states than in blue states. As affluence correlates with intelligence, the IQ gap presumably follows the same pattern.

In states like Massachusetts, liberal whiterpeople who vote Democratic and whose friends all vote Democratic think of Republicans as simpletons of a lower social class than themselves. And in the Bay State, that's understandable. Gelman points out that this is a problem when those localized assumptions are projected across the entire country, because in other regions of the country, they simply don't hold. In the South, the monied classes are overwhelmingly Republican.

There are no data tracking IQ and voting patterns at the state level. The GSS, however, does break respondents up into the nine broad geographic regions used by the US Census.

First, I should point out that during the Bush years, in aggregate Republicans are smarter than Democrats are (with IQ scores converted from Wordsum results of 100.5 and 98.6, respectively--independents are lower than either, at 95.3). This holds in every region of the country except for New England, where Democrats average 4.9 IQ points higher than Republicans do*.

But in the interracial status games whites play against one another, minorities are often invisible. Considering the same period of time, white Democrats are slightly more intelligent than white Republicans are (102.1 to 101.7, with independents at 97.6). A noisome Republican can use this to force a whiterperson into a politically incorrect corner where he has to choose between conceding that Republicans are smarter than Democrats are or admitting that the Democratic average is dragged down by its one-third non-white contingent.

Among whites alone, Republicans and Democrats differ in red and blue states. Following is a table showing Obama's advantage among white voters and the IQ advantage (converted from Wordsum scores with the assumption the white mean is equivalent to an IQ of 100 with a standard deviation of 15) of self-identified white Democrats by region**. Only responses from 2000-2008 are included to ensure that what we're looking at is contemporary:

Region

Obama vote+ (%)

White Dem IQ+

New England

14.3

7.4

Pacific

10.0

1.1

Middle Atlantic

1.0

(0.3)

East North Central

0.2

0.2

West North Central

(6.4)

1.2

Mountain

(14.8)

(0.9)

South Atlantic

(24.0)

(0.6)

East South Central

(47.0)

(1.4)

West South Central

(49.3)

(2.6)

By region, white Republicans in red states are a little more intelligent than white Democrats are. In blue states, it is the reverse, with white Democrats being smarter than white Republicans. The correlation between Obama's level of white support and the average white Democrat's IQ advantage over the average white Republican's is .72 (p=.03) at the regional level. This provides some explanation for why people in the Northeast may see the GOP as the party of rustic dummies while those in the South see it as the party of merit and prosperity.

Bundling states into nine broad geographic regions isn't optimal, because red and blue states are lumped together in varying degrees, especially the East and West North Central areas. That such a pattern is nonetheless apparent suggests that at the state level it is even stronger. This isn't surprising. After all, it's implied in Gelman's book, as IQ and earning power are correlated at the group level.

The only region that jumps out in surprise is the Middle Atlantic, which includes New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. My guess is that many people involved in the financial industry from New York and New Jersey are Republicans, buoying the average. In the other direction, those three states are all heavily unionized, translating into lots of working class Democrats.

** To obtain white votes by region and compare them, I used exit polling data by state to obtain white percentages of each state's total vote and multiplied them together. I then added up the total white votes for each candidate for all the states in a particular region to arrive at that region's vote distribution for the 2008 Presidential election.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

The Pew Research Center recently put out a report entitled "Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in US History". This translates as the white percentage of total voters being the lowest it ever has been in a Presidential election. Recognizing the slow but steady relative reduction in the size of the white vote is nothing novel. It has been occuring for several decades, to the enormous benefit of the Democratic party.

What I found interesting was the level of voter participation relative to eligibility, by race. The following graph shows actual voters as a percentage of eligible voters, by race, on a relative scale for the population as a whole. That is, if the graph included a line for the entire electorate, it would be a perfectly horizontal with a y-value of 100. If in a given election cycle whites represent 80% of actual voters and 75% of eligible voters, they have a civic score of 107 ((80/75)*100). Whites are represented by the white line, blacks by the black line, Hispanics by the brown line, and Asians by the yellow line:

With the exception of the steady increase in civic-mindedness among blacks over the last couple of decades, the relative values are pretty steady. Hispanic and Asian electoral participation has consistently remained below that of blacks and whites for as long as reliable demographic data has been kept. This helps in understanding why, at over 15% of the US population, Hispanics make up less than half that proportion of actual voters (with age structure and illegal residency status completing the picture) and also why anything that facilitates casting a ballot will tend to be supported by Democrats and opposed by (non-politically suicidal) Republicans.

A few other noteworthy facts gleaned from the report:

- The percentage of eligible white males who voted in 2008 dropped to 64.2%, down from 65.9% in 2004. That 1.7 point decrease was more than three times larger than the decrease among white females, from 68.4% in 2004 to 67.9% in 2008. White men, the GOP's stalwarts, weren't inspired by what was offered them last November.

- Eligible black women were the most likely group to vote in 2008, and also the most inclined to vote for Obama.

- The male:female participation rate ratio by race follows the common 'hierarchical' pattern found in so many other measures of social variables. Male participation among eligible voters as a percentage of female participation among eligible voters, by race, averaged for the 2004 and 2008 elections:

Friday, May 08, 2009

++Addition++In the comments, N/A, who runs Race/History/Evolution Notes, sets me straight on my unsubstantiated presumption that black male-white female relationships are the most common among interracial couples in the US. Note to self: Look at the data before spouting off, dumbass. You'd think, given the content here, I'd have already internalized as much.

Among non-blacks, one in five men are unfaithful. Among black men, it jumps to one in three. This despite the plausible presumption that because marriage rates among black men are lower than they are for other men, the quality of the relationships among the black minority that is married should be higher than it is for non-blacks. That is not the case, however.

This follows the pattern Rushton details in Race, Evolution, and Behavior--Asian men are the most likely to be married and least likely to cheat, white men are the next most likely to be married and second least likely to cheat, followed by Hispanics (not covered by Rushton), and then black men, who are the least likely to marry and the most likely to cheat when they do.

Tying this into the post from which it originated, blacks have the most game. They get the most women and are the least likely to suffer from the oneitis frequently afflicting betas. Herbs**, as Roissy calls them, are most common among Asians and least common among blacks.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

++Addition++As I interpret it, a comment by Case essentially conceptualizes the different perceptions in intelligence as self-serving bias. High IQ people attribute their intelligence to personal behaviors like a high need for cognition, hard work, copious studying, openness to new ideas, etc (never mind that these things are all correlated with IQ to begin with). Those with low IQs, on the other hand, attribute their lower intelligence to the (bad) luck of the draw and see their gifted counterparts as being just that--gifted with high intelligence.

The irony about general intelligence is that ordinary folks of average intelligence recognize its variance across people, its generality across domains, and its importance in life. Yet educated elites meanwhile often remain implacably opposed to the very concept of general intelligence, and deny its variance, generality, and importance. Professors and students at elite universities are especially prone to this pseudohumility. They socialize only with other people of extraordinarily high intelligence, so the width of the whole bell curve lies outside their frame of reference. I have met theoretical physicists who claimed that any human could understand superstring theory and quantum mechanics if only he or she was given the right educational opportunities. Of course, such scientists talk only with other physicists with IQs above 140, and seem to forget that their janitors, barbers, and car mechanics are in fact real humans too, so they can rest comfortably in the envy-deflecting delusion that there are no significant differences in general intelligence.

A recurring theme here has been the search for a socially desirable attribute that correlates inversely with IQ. Miller suggests perspicacity in identifying differences in intelligence is just such an attribute.

I am skeptical of the assertion that people three standard deviations above the mean are so obtuse when it comes to seeing the realities of such differences that they really believe they do not exist. Hence my more cynical claim: Candidness in expressing true perceptions of differences in intelligence (and a general disregard for or unawareness of politically correct axioms) is inversely correlated with IQ.

Whatever the level of sincerity is, smarter people claim less variance in intelligence exists than duller people do. The following graph shows the size of the standard deviation for total responses by Wordsum score for the GSS question on the intelligence of whites (white line) and of blacks (black line). The smaller the standard deviation, the closer responses for that Wordsum score huddle around the average intelligence value. Sample sizes are too small for perceptions of other groups. The intelligence questions are on a scale from 1 (unintelligent) to 7 (intelligent):

The second graph facilitates the same observation in a less technical way. The percentage of all respondents who choose the middling value of 4, representing perfectly average intelligence, for whites (white line) and blacks (black line):

Whether it is blacks or whites being evaluated, the trend is clear--the more intelligent someone is, the more likely he is to see (or claim to see) everybody existing in a state of cognitive parity. Only vulgar rednecks claim to see differences that aren't there!

Assuming there is some disingenuity in the putative parity perceived by the intelligent, it's not difficult to see why it is to be maintained. Although Miller seems to be arguing that those with high intelligence are so surrounded by others like themselves (the cognitive stratification described by Herrnstein and Murray) they forget that real people exist in the social classes below themselves, in using the term "pseudohumility"--implying a calculated public downplaying of the importance of intelligence and their generous helpings of it--he nails it.

If intelligence is innate or even just unmalleable past a certain young age, those with high intelligence are unable to attribute their own successes to personal dedication, creativity, education, hard work, a strong personality, the liberal values they were raised with, and the like. They just lucked into it. And that means confronting sticky things like the fact that others aren't so fortunate and that with their elevated intelligence comes an elevated level of responsibility.

At whatever distance between nature and nurture reality sits (somewhere around 60%-40% if nurture encompasses everything that is not nature), it's closer to the former than the cognitive egalitarians would like it to be. Any ground ceded to nature threatens the entire educational structure. Most people probably intrinsically sense that smart kids go to Harvard more than Harvard makes the students it takes in into smart young adults. The last thing Harvard wants, however, is for that to become the conventional wisdom. It also threatens to impact a host of other issues like immigration, drug policy, welfare use, etc.

Friday, May 01, 2009

++Addition++In the comments, Roissy reviews some of the fundamentals of game, and also takes note in a post about a super beta prostrate. I am uncomfortable making assertions without empirical backing, but I don't really disagree with him. He misreads in saying that I think adopting game only helps the rich get richer--to the contrary, it helps the poor more, because it gives them a little bling to flash around when they'd otherwise have nothing, while the rich are already operating closer to game's optimum and consequently are closer to the point of diminishing returns. Confidence, assertiveness, smooth operating, creating sexual tension verbally and non-verbally, and everything else involved in game, ceteris paribus, raise a man's desirability. Roissy gives an estimate of 1-3 points worth. That sounds right, the gain depending on one's level of confidence to begin with.

To the extent that I disagree with him, it's in not seeing how he squares this with his ranking of game as being of greater importance than physical attractiveness, or in charging that studies like the one mentioned are of little value because they judge responses to questions, not actual behavior--if the participants were being disingenuous, wouldn't we expect them to place dependability, compatibility, intelligence, status, etc above looks, as it this last one is socially viewed as the most shallow of attributes to be taken in by? But girls still say physical attractiveness trumps everything else (as Agnostic points out, the advantage probably lessens as women age, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is still at or near the top before menopause).

I am not sure how the other pointers like dressing well and lifting for definition are 'contentious'. Are there a meaningful number of men who do not believe these things help? My experience has been that those who deny they do are slobbish or lazy, and try to rationalize this by claiming that cleaning and toning up makes no difference, so why bother?

There is obviously a great deal of substance in what Roissy writes. He knows the scene infinitely better than I do--when my girl teased me about not "kicking it" on weekends, after expressing surprise that illiterates are able to get college scholarships and pointing out that playing footyis kicking it, I asked if she'd rather me go to Orlando's instead (a nite club). In disgust, an "Eww, no!" Not a world my interests come from. Parenthetically, if readers are under the assumption that I'm a frustrated hater, I'd ask a couple of guys who've seen pictures of my latest to rate her in the comments (be honest, I won't be pissed if it's too low because you're purblind)--not to have a sizing contest under an internet pseudonym, but because unfortunately those who criticize anything libertine are at risk of being dismissed without consideration as bitter killjoys.

Further, Roissy edifies in anonymity and without any monetary recompense. I did not at all mean to insinuate that he is snake oil salesman, just my feeling that many guys are selling themselves short in believing rehearsing various lines will turn them into Casanovas, quixotically refusing to know themselves.

What's the problem with giving them too much hope? Unattainably high expectations mean more time striving for something that will never come, with unrealistically high standards that aren't going to be met. So guys who expect too much out of game delay going after what they are able to get--and there is probably a an IQ floor of around 11o for those who take an intellectual interest in it. I want smarties to get to work as soon as possible!

More generally, it strikes me as a socially pathological lifestyle. Black guys have the most game. They consistently outscore other groups in perceptions of self-confidence, have higher levels of assertiveness and higher levels of testosterone (which is presumably correlated to most 'alpha' qualities). They have more sexual partners, are more likely to cheat, and are far less likely to stay with the mother of their children than other men are--all signs of the greatest desire to hit the g-spot and move on. Is this worthy of celebration or emulation? Should I be happy that a sharp, healthy, affluent, perspicacious, good-looking stud like Roissy is working to put more notches into his belt instead of working to penetrate more of his wife's eggs? That, with all his influence, he ridicules the (putative lack of) virility of men who push strollers when, excepting Israel and the US (which is right on the cusp, with whites and Asians below it), every Western nation on the planet has a total fertility rate below replacement?

To take it a step further: What if what Game represents is the beginnings of a mass, populist revolt against PC? If so, then that's really something major, given what PC is and how long it's been around.

If that's the case, it's heartening, but it seems more of a libertarian reassertion of virility than a rebuke of the blank slatism that underlies political correctness. The objective study of what exactly qualifies as game and its effectiveness is elusive, so I am just trying to speculate logically. In the sense that the ability to get women to spread for you is celebrated, it is a rejection of the feminist desire for you to treat all women like your self-sufficient, independent sister. But the presumption that game is an acquirable technique mastered with sufficient study and practice, as if reading Roissy will make you into a leisure suit Larry, strikes me as wishful egalitarian thinking.

Women rate physical appearance as the most important attribute in determining what attracts them to men. A short, balding, unathletic, homely goofball is at a huge disadvantage against a Johnny Depp clone. Having game will be better for Larry than not having it, but as long as Depp isn't agoraphobic or psychologically unstable, the girls are going to flock to him at Larry's expense. Memorizing the right pick up lines isn't going to change that. Assuming Roissy is genuine, I'll bet the house that in appearance he resembles Depp more than Larry.

Going in the other direction, this is obvious. Trying to pull the wool over the eyes of most men is futile*--our level of physical attraction is evident and quite stable within the first couple of minutes (or seconds), barring something gross or unsettling emerging down the road.

That's not too like a comparison, of course. There is more hope for fat and ugly men than there is for fugly women--men's anchors are set in deeper water. But there is only so much we can do to raise our value in the eyes of the other sex. Think of someone like Elliot Spitzer, who despite having money, power, and presumably being an 'alpha', had to illegally pay for sex with a woman who some guys of less elevated status and more mild personalities would just be settling for.

* I am not considering artificial bodily enhancements like enlargements that improve the objective physical attractiveness of women.